Keir Starmer resigns: what comes next? | Coffee House

Every critic that, you know, inside the party and particularly outside it, is going to be screaming for a general election now. He doesn't want to leave! Well, he did try and cling on for a long time. But we must. Hello and welcome to Coffee House on this big historic day, The Spectator's political TV show. I am Tim Shipman. And I'm Noah Hoffman. And what are we going to talk about? Well, we are having, ladies and gentlemen, our seventh prime minister in 10 years. Keir Starmer announced this morning that he was resigning as leader of the Labour Party. And just before we came on air, Wes Streeting, who resigned recently as Health Secretary, said he is not going to contest that election. So it looks, on the face of it, like we are on course for an Andy Burnham premiership before very much longer. Now, Noah, you watched Starmer in the street this morning. That lectern wheeled out. Political Twitter getting excited about the hot guy with the lectern again. Hot podium guy did not disappoint. I think he's kept up his gym appearances. Very good. He's getting plenty of practice as well, lugging that podium around. Yeah, no, he did a great job. What do you make of Starmer, though? I mean, it was very Starmer to start with, kind of, here's a long list of my achievements. And then it got quite emotional at the end. Yes. So Keir Starmer came out, delivered his resignation speech, where he railed off what he described as the big achievements of his premiership. Now, what a lot of people couldn't help but notice was that some of those key policies that he described as his legacies were actually policies that he was initially very much against. So that includes lifting the two-child benefit cap, that includes a social media ban for under-16s. But a lot of other policy achievements that he described would have been listed really as failures by many economists, many in the business community. So there was no really great big announcement that people think Keir Starmer will go down in history for as a game-changing prime minister. And almost the way he framed it was sort of, well, I changed the Labour Party. I drove out the loonies. I won an election. Yes, but I do think that is... I do think where he really does deserve credit is for driving out antisemitism in the Labour Party. I know, totally. I totally agree. That was initially his thing. But it's quite telling, isn't it? That actually, even when he's pitching his kind of, this is what I achieved, he's effectively saying, I sorted out the Labour Party. I won a general election, but now Labour MPs are thinking about who they want to fight the next election, and they don't want it to be me. And I've listened to that. So ultimately, even his own pitch was kind of, well, I sorted out the party, but I've not been able to sort out the country. And a lot of the stuff that he gets excited about, I mean, if you've got kids, then breakfast clubs are a great thing, but it's hardly a sort of seismic epoch-defining policy. And that seems to be one of the things he gets excited about. Minimum wage. Any Labour prime minister would have put the minimum wage. And by the way, so did pretty much every Tory prime minister, maybe not as much as Starmer did in the end. But yeah, it felt like a man sort of desperately trying to get that, you know, sort of legacy list. And I thought back to when Gordon Brown did his kind of preparation at Labour conference and reeled everything off. And the crowd there was like, good God, look what we have actually achieved, a heck of a lot here. And I doubt if he'd reeled that off at Labour conference, there'd have been more than sort of enthusiastic applause. It wasn't going to get everybody's sort of juices flowing. And notably, he did only get emotional when he started talking about his quote, fantastic wife, Vic, and the prospect of going back to just being a normal dad so much as he can after being the prime minister. Yeah. And she was his rock. I mean, even the language, you know, we've heard this language before. I mean, Theresa May's husband, Philip, was the rock, you know, his sort of bubbly spinning in his local golf club as we speak, listening to that. And it is striking how politicians who aren't necessarily the most adept at the sort of empathy and emotion of the job that make people better at the job generally, think of Theresa May, think of Margaret Thatcher, you think of Gordon Brown, and now you think of Keir Starmer, all of them very emotional at the end. If they displayed a bit more of that emotion for what they were doing, they might have made more of a success of it. And I guess that's Andy Burnham's selling point is that not just when he leaves, but when he appears at the podium, we'll probably see the sad eyes and the caring for the nation, and that's what they're effectively replacing him with. But it all felt a bit banal, don't you think? It did. And I think that was in a way a sort of metaphor for his entire premiership. There was no binding ideology. There was no clear set of values that he was able to sort of turn to, to explain everything he was doing in the country. Instead, what we got was a litany of failed policies, a litany of U-turns that came to define his premiership. I mean, interestingly. Some of which he's now boasting about, as you point out. Yes. But also, I mean, there was a lot missing from that speech that will have become a big mess that Andy Burnham's going to have to clear up. So Keir Starmer oversaw huge tax rises. He oversaw a further inflation of the welfare bill. We saw the sort of march of the human rights lawyers and the mess that that had on particular policies, such as the Chagos Islands disaster, which ended up having to be withdrawn as well. I think Keir Starmer will go down as a well-meaning man. And I think he is genuine in his sort of argument that he wanted to see the country do well, that he loves Britain, that he wants it to be a better place for everyone, regardless of their income, to live. But the fact that he was so stubborn, that he was quite sanctimonious in the eyes of a lot of people, that he didn't listen to his party, is going to be written down in the history books and is going to be one of the big contributing factors to where we are today. Yeah, no, I think that's right. And I was talking to a Conservative guy who'd been in Downing Street under a couple of the previous regimes, who said to me this morning, the strange thing is, there wasn't a massive scandal. There wasn't some great titanic policy battle that collapsed and he was unable to pass his thing. This is the first Prime Minister in quite some time who's been removed for just being a bit crap. And that's actually interesting, but that has implications, doesn't it? Yeah, there's a lot to unpack. It's not been building... Unless you've been paying attention inside Westminster, what do you think? This is a bit weird, isn't it, for a lot of people turning their TVs on. Yeah, so there's a lot to unpack in just what the public will be thinking seeing this spectacle. And having come back from a few days on the Costa del Sol, it was a big reminder to me that a lot of... Well, some of us were doing live shows to the nation after the May 14th by-election. But it was a big reminder of just how much Westminster is a bubble and how swathes of the public are not in tune to the everyday niche, bickering, infighting and machinations of the Labour Party. And I think a lot of people today will turn on the news or will see on their phone or on social media, as many people get their news from now, that the Prime Minister has resigned and they will genuinely be surprised. And what will they ask? They will say, why? Because as you mentioned, Tim, there was no one major binding scandal or disaster as, for instance, we saw with Liz Truss's mini-budget or with Boris Johnson and Partygate and Chris Fincher that really precipitated the resignation speech we've seen today. And I do think a lot of the public are going to be annoyed about this. They're going to be annoyed about the short-termism. They're going to be annoyed that a man is about to walk into Downing Street, and we will go into this a bit further, effectively coronated by Labour MPs. He was voted into Parliament by thousands of people in Makefield. But beyond that, nobody voted for this man and nobody voted for his mandate. What his team are promising are very big radical economic changes, very much to the left of Starmer if what he's promising to go by is correct and will not be U-turned on down the line. Well, this is the question, isn't it? We don't know what he stands for. But the public are going to say, we didn't ask for this. We didn't choose this. And frankly, we're surprised this is even happening at all, given that Keir Starmer was not the worst thing since sliced bread. He was by no means excellent. He's by no means popular. His polling is dismal. But I do think a lot of people are going to be surprised that what we've seen today is the result of Labour looking inwards and their infighting and their internal discussions about keeping their own seats. We know they hate the psychodrama. We've seen that in the polls. We saw it for 10 years under the Tories. Every poll suggests they hate divided parties. I mean, you know, Labour MPs have made a sort of calculation that Burnham will at the very least be able to perform better than Starmer. But as you say... But that was their decision, not the public's decision. That's the point. And there was a lot of stuff, even post Boris Johnson, who'd kind of probably, you know, broken people's desire to keep seeing him on their televisions. There was still quite a lot of anger that Tory MPs had got rid of him. You know, the public want to be the ones delivering the, you know, the you're fired notice. That's what they like to do. And Johnson, I think, was still probably more popular, particularly on the right, than Starmer is anywhere now. And if you look at Makefield, you know, what bound people together there? You know, there were Labour people voting for Andy Burnham to get rid of Keir Starmer. There were people voting for reform to get rid of Keir Starmer. You know, Tory tactical voters voting for both Labour and reform to get rid of Keir Starmer. The one binding thing seemed to be to get rid of Keir Starmer. It doesn't look like we're going to have a contest, does it? I mean, streeting, pulling out. Are you surprised by that? I'm not surprised, but I think he has had a lot of nerve in the way he's addressed the public versus his advisers in private. Just last week, I was at a press conference in a very, very flashy conference room in the city of London, where Wes Streeting said, I have the numbers. I will stand. And I quote, this needs to be a battle of ideas. It can't just be a coronation. We need to iron out the policies that we want to stand for and how we're going to differentiate ourselves from Starmer's premiership. Now, of course, that turned out just to be, as many predicted, his pitch to be chancellor under Andy Burnham. Wes Streeting has tweeted that he's going to support Burnham. He's not going to stand in a contest. They've been sort of having dirty deal talks behind the scenes. And really, his whole press conference that was done under the guise of being a leadership pitch was his pitch to be chancellor. Yeah, I mean, we saw this at the dying days of Theresa May, where everyone knew Boris Johnson was going to win. And Dominic Raab suddenly popped up and started saying tough things on crime. Oh, would you like to be home secretary by any chance? Sajid Javid started talking about the economy and ended up being chancellor. Anyway, it seems like Streeting is happy that his ideas are being listened to. A plan for Britain to grow again and grow together, with a progressive capitalism focused on wealth creation as much as wealth distribution, to lead the world in the fourth industrial revolution and protect people from its risks, to modernise our public services, to give Britain energy security, to build stronger alliances with democracies around the world, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Having spoken at length with Andy in recent days, I'm convinced there is a place for those ideas under his leadership. Well, doubtless, because Andy Burnham at the moment is listening to a lot of people and saying to them, oh yeah, that sounds really good. The question is, what's he actually going to adopt? There are people around Shabana Mahmood who got their hooks into Andy Burnham months ago because they concluded she couldn't become leader. So they thought, we'll go and see if we can make Burnham sensible by layer lights. But most of the people around him, Louise Haig, Annalise Midgley, who've been effectively running his campaign, are, you know, I think they're both very able, but they're people of the left. And you and your sources, multiple sources, the people around him are a pretty motley crew, aren't they? Yeah, so at Labour HQ in Makefield, you had the likes of Seb Corbyn, Jeremy Corbyn's son, slapping Andy Burnham on the back, holding court among his Labour admirers. You had a lot of old momentum types, Dan Parks being one, who were about whispering in ears. You had a lot of people working on the digital side of comms, doing the TikTok, doing all the Instagram content, which has proved to be actually very important for British politics going forward, for conveying messaging. And Burnham's stuff looked pretty good, you'd have to say. It looked great, but the people behind those comms were very staunch left wingers of the more momentum tendency, that is the very far left tendency, of the Labour Party. So that does go back to this question about a general election. If those policies, rather than Shabana Mahmood's policies, which are more closely aligned with Keir Starmer, are going to be the ones that Burnham takes forward, how can he do that without a mandate? And I think on that note, I would ask you, Tim, what do you think the likelihood of a general election in the next year or so is? I mean, I think it's possible, and I think he's going to come under a huge amount of pressure to do it. We've already seen this morning that Nigel Farage has called for one, Kemi Bainock not, because it's not the best time for the Tories to be having a general election. Oh, funny that, goodness me. Look, I've spoken to people this morning who are planning to work for Andy Burnham, who've said to me, if we get a decent lead in the polls, I'll be telling him to go for it, and you can trust that, even if I'm telling you at the time that that is not the case. Look, there are lots of things here, and history has some lessons for people here. If you jump too soon and don't explain to the public why you're trying to do it, you end up like Theresa May. She inherited David Cameron's majority of about 20 and was desperate to go and increase that. Then you look at Gordon Brown, who was the other example. May arguably went for it, and that was a mistake. Gordon Brown didn't go for it, and everyone pretty much agrees that was a mistake in 2007. He had a chance to win a general election under his own steam. The Tories were wobbling at that point, Cameron and Osborne, and had he gone for it, I think people think he would have got a majority, though it would have been less than the 66 that Tony Blair won in 2015, and Gordon Brown did not want to preside over reducing the majority. So Andy Burnham's going to be in the same position here. If, as we see from a bounce in the polls, that Labour get level with or ahead of a reformer, from that point onwards, and if that continues over the next few months, and he has a decent following wind at the start, and some goodwill from the country and the Labour Party, by Christmas people are going to be screaming for a general election on the Labour side, on the sort of strategic side, the people looking at the big picture and saying, look, this is the best opportunity we're going to have to win a majority. And come next spring, if Burnham could look at it and see that he was going to get a majority of 40, 50, 60, that would be a pretty sensible thing to go and do. But how many Labour MPs are going to want that? Because that's going to involve 150 of them losing their seats. And, you know, that's not going to be popular at all. Now, Andy Burnham has done some bold things. Let's not be unkind to him. Applying for Gorton and Denton, running in Makerfield, which was not a given seat to win, though he won it very handsomely in the end. And that took a bit of balls. But calling a general election when you've been prime minister for a few short months, it is a massive gamble. I remember talking to the Rishi Sunak people, because at the end, when they called an election, we were all saying they should have waited longer. And when I interviewed people for my fourth and final book on all of this nonsense, some of them said to me, you all said we needed to wait. The problem was we should have gone much earlier. If he'd gone in the spring of 2023, just after getting the job, he'd done his reset with Brussels, all the Boris Johnson sort of legacy stuff hadn't bubbled up. Maybe that would have been the best time for Sunak. But it didn't look like they were going to win, even if he'd gone for it. So telling the party that this is the best time to get the best result we might get is one thing, but telling them it's going to be a much worse result than last time, it will take some serious cojones to do that. So on balance, my very long-winded answer to your question is, on balance, probably not. But I think the biggest question in British politics has gone from when and how is Keir Starmer leaving to when is the general election. But we know what Burnham wants to do, because he said, I wouldn't have started with these fiscal rules. I wouldn't have put in place the let's not raise income tax pledge from before the last general election. I think he thinks he needs to stick to that. Isn't it right that the people around Mahmood have kind of persuaded him to be sort of small C conservative on crime, on migration, but on the economy and tax, all the implications seem to be that he is desperate to raise tax, raise spending, raise borrowing. It's very hard to see how he can make good on his big radical pledges without raising income tax. Or making massive cuts elsewhere, which... And he, frankly, I know he told the Times that I'm going to cut welfare in order to fund defence. I mean, I think that is for the birds. I cannot see a world in which he comes in on a big left-wing platform and then goes in to cut welfare. I think the only way he does that is if he offers it as part of a six-point plan or whatever and says to MPs, you've got to back all of this. And if they get four things they like, maybe they can swallow that. And if he's got the support, you know, that he appears to have across the parliamentary party, maybe he gets away with it. But, you know, every critic that, you know, inside the party and particularly outside it is going to be screaming for a general election now. And we've already seen it from Farage. What does all this mean for reform on the Tories, do you think? Well, the first opposition politician to come out and demand a general election was Farage. I think he put in his statement that he's been waiting around for long enough. He's ready to go. If there was a general election soon, the implications for the right-wing of politics will be huge. I mean, we could see a big decimation of the Tory party, despite their success in Aberdeen. Kemi Badenoch herself polls very well, but the party is still tarnished by the reputation that has been left in tatters after 14 years in government. So what happens there? There's also, and this cannot be underestimated, despite reform pretty consistently ranging between sort of 27 and 30 in the national polls, there is a huge anyone but Farage vote. And I think what we would see in a general election is a big move to tactical voting and to who is the least worse option. And for a lot of people, the worst option will be Farage. So I know that he says he wants a general election right now, but it would be interesting to see whether that does backfire because the Conservatives aren't very popular. And so a lot of people may think, well, the best option on who can take on Farage, even if I do personally like Kemi, some people may say, would possibly be Andy Byrne. Yeah, I mean, I think you could get a situation quite easily if we had an election next spring where Farage would probably be the leading light on the right and Reform would be the largest party on the right. Whether they would be able to get ahead of Labour is a moot point. And I guess Burnham would not call an election unless he thinks that Labour are going to win it and win it reasonably comfortably. But I think the timing makes a massive difference for the people on the right, because if it's any time now or next year, and don't forget Reform have been preparing for a general election. Farage is personally convinced there's going to be an election next year and has been telling people for quite a while, nine months to a year. He sort of thinks there'll be some kind of economic crisis that brings it to a head or, you know, something off the back of, you know, Labour changing leaders. So he's got his team, you know, they're working to a deadline that everything is ready, you know, policies, all of that stuff by the end of this year and they're ready to go next year. But you talked about the massive tactical voting and there is. If British politics becomes about should Nigel Farage be Prime Minister, which would be one of the big questions when you get into a general election campaign. If Reform don't really train on from here, if they get stuck in that mid to late 20s and Kemi Badenoch continues to perform, there are some Conservatives who think, you know, if the Tories can get themselves in the low to mid 20s and tactical voting against Farage accelerates across the piece, not just from, you know, people on the left, but Tory voters and, you know, sort of Southern wealthy Lib Dems as well start voting Conservative, it's not impossible. And I had this conversation with a Labour person this morning. You know, they see a revived Labour Party and a lengthy period in which maybe the Tories replace Reform on the right as the sort of dominant. And it only takes a few points to move. Once you're the team that's ahead, you then have the right to say, we're the challenger. And it's not lunatic now to suggest that an election in 2029 might be between Labour and the Conservative Party. A lot of Reform people will be literally screaming at me through the camera now and saying, don't be so deranged shippers. And maybe that is deranged. And certainly if there's an election in the next 18 months, I think Reform will easily outperform the Conservative Party. But you can just about see a world in which it pans out slightly differently down the line. When are we going to know you're close to the Labour lot? How quickly do you think Burnham sets out what his actual plan is? Because we've got a lot of ideas about, you know, everybody at the moment is saying, ah, Miata Phambulo is one of his senior policy advisers. This is what she wants to do. He's got... They themselves have been busy telling us who his economics advisers are. And read more in the magazine about that this week, where Michael Simmons is going to get to the bottom of who's advising him and what that might mean. But how quickly do we think we'll hear from Andy Burnham himself about, this is my plan? I don't think it will be too soon. And even this morning on the airwaves, MP outriders for Burnham who were speaking about, you know, why he would be a great prime minister, sort of made the suggestion that the public should not expect him to have a plan, oven-baked and ready to go. They came out onto the airwaves... Well, we've seen oven-baked plans before. Yeah, they were, Mark. They came out onto the airwaves and said, the public should be reassured because Andy Burnham has done a great job in Manchester, in their view. And he's a great politician. He's a great communicator. And that's all you need to know to be reassured by his entry into Downing Street. They would not go into any clear-cut policies, any sort of Burnham manifesto. And in fact, they did make the suggestion on the airwaves that Keir Starmer should go a bit longer till September, which is what he said this morning. However, that is likely to be a lot shorter if there's no contest because they don't have a plan ready. Even with a contest, it'll be done by September. Without a contest, it will be next month. It'll be by the time of recess. Yes, but Burnham's team, interestingly, are playing a few delay tactics right now in terms of coming forward to the public with a policy programme. And that's because it's not ready yet. And I think that is all the more reason that a lot of people watching their television and reading the news today are going to be quite concerned. Yeah, I mean, you look at what's been done so far and it's not much. And you have a situation where, you know, this is a guy, yes, the argument they're making is one that's persuasive to Labour MPs. Everybody be calm because we'll have a programme, which Keir didn't, and he's a better communicator. He can empathise. It'll all look and sound better. But unless there is a plan, looking and sounding better is, you know, of marginal benefit. I think most Labour MPs think it will be of some benefit and it won't be worse than it was. But if they want to actually transform things, it's quite difficult to do that in the middle of a parliamentary term. And as you've rightly pointed out, there is no mandate for anything really, really radical. So, you know, we wait and see. And the most important appointment is going to be his chance for the Exchequer. Still a lot of buzz around Ed Miliband, as we showed on Friday. There's quite a long list of possibles. Rachel Reeves is now off that list, we're told. But there's still talk of Pat McFadden or Darren Jones or now Wes Streeting having paid the price of bowing down before the King of the North. Is he now the Hand of the King? But also, I think the ultimate irony would be Ed Miliband being shunned from that position because he banked his future career on behind the scenes, orchestrating Keir Starmer's downfall, calling for him to go. He was the first person to walk in and say, name the date. Indeed. But Keir Starmer has actually let him sort of run riot in the department for energy and net zero and has caved to all of Ed Miliband's demands, say, when it comes to North Sea drilling. Now, at the moment, there are some in Burnham's team who think Ed Miliband can't be chancellor because of issues such as North Sea drilling. We had the union general secretary, Sharon Graham, coming out and saying, you cannot make this man chancellor because of his net zero zealotry and the impact that's having on jobs for our members. So what would be, I mean, it would be a bit funny if he didn't end up getting that job because of the net zero sort of zealotry that Keir Starmer allowed him to have. But ironically, Burnham may not. Yeah, I mean, you know, Burnham has got a lot of decisions to make and he's realising that already, I think, that running Britain is quite a bit more complicated than running Manchester with a budget of three billion, you know, as opposed to Britain with a budget of near a three trillion. So yeah, these are interesting times and we will be back with you to discuss every aspect of this going forward. But it just remains for us to do one thing, doesn't it? Indeed, the set is out of date and we cannot be having that for our viewers. He doesn't want to leave! Well, he did try and cling on for a long time. He must. But it's very, I mean, choose your words based on your political views, sad, happy, somewhere in between, that dear Sir Keir will no longer, or not for much longer, be on the wall behind us, soon to be replaced, no doubt, by one Andy Burnham. All political careers, they say, end in failure. And in this studio, they end in being shoved under the table. Farewell, Sir Keir. Thank you, Noah. And thank you all for tuning in. We'll see you soon.